UNESCO will hold ceremony for International Day of Commemoration to honour the victims of the Holocaust

• © Album Auschwitz, Musée d'Histoire de la Shoah, Yad Vashem, Jérusalem

The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, will take part on 28 January in a commemoration ceremony at Organization Headquarters to honour the victims of the Holocaust. Other notable participants will include Isaac Herzog, Israeli Minister of Social affairs and Welfare and and Minister of the Jewish Diaspora, Society, and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism; Xavier Darcos, French Minister of National Education; and Simone Veil, Honorary President of the French Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

The ceremony is organized by UNESCO and the Permanent Delegation of Israel to UNESCO, in partnership with France Télévisions and Yad Vashem, the Israeli-based Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, with the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. The ceremony held within the framework of the designation by the United Nations’ General Assembly of 27 January, date of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, as International Day of Commemoration to honour the victims of the Holocaust.

The ceremony (7 p.m., Room I) with feature addresses by Koïchiro Matsuura; David G. Kornbluth, Permanent Delegate of Israel to UNESCO; Isaac Herzog; Xavier Darcos; David de Rothschild, President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah; Miry Gross, Yad Vashem’s director of relations with French-speaking countries; and Simone Veil. The French Army choir will perform Hebrew songs and Rabbi and Cantor Raphael Cohen will recite the Jewish prayer for the dead.

At 7.45 p.m., after a presentation by France Télévisions’ president Patrick de Carolis, there will be a preview of the film La Résistance face à la Shoah: Quand il fallait sauver les Juifs (the Resistance in face of the Shoah: When Jews had to be saved), the second in a documentary series about the French Resistance, which will be aired on French public television in February.

The exhibition Auschwitz: les profondeurs de l’abîme (Auschwitz: the depth of the abyss) will be opened at 6.30 p.m. It was curated by Yad Vashem drawing on two exceptional eye-witness accounts, an album of 200 photos taken by SS guards in May and June 1944, and a series of sketches by Zinovii Tolkachev, a young Jewish Red Army recruit who entered the Auschwitz camp with the first liberators. The exhibition will remain at UNESCO until 22 February (admission free, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., ID required).

• Author(s):Media Advisory N°2008-03
• Source:UNESCOPRESS
• 15-01-2008